


Once the Ashes Have Settled

by SeverinadeStrango



Category: Sengoku Basara
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Grief, Heavy Angst, Heavy Loss, Massacre, Mourning, Severina's June 2019 Requests, Themes of suicide, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 05:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19222807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeverinadeStrango/pseuds/SeverinadeStrango
Summary: In which it is all up to Motochika now.





	Once the Ashes Have Settled

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sam/gifts).



> This was written for Sam, my sister, as a request for the month of June 2019.

How long? One, two, three hours – Motochika still had not moved from his heavy perch on the rubble that had once been _some_ part of Shikoku, now left indiscernible amongst the rest of the remains. He was hunched over, the heels of his palms pressed hard against his face, covering his eyes, he couldn’t do it he couldn’t bring himself to look again after he’d scoured the area for life time after time and even though he knew that he would do so again in a few short hours with just as much success as before – none at all. What of the hand that he had grabbed that had come away in his grasp when he had desperately pulled, trying to save even one of his loyal friends. 

His brothers.

They’d depended on him and he’d doomed them all, he’d placed his trust in the wrong person even Mori himself _that bastard that bastard_ would not have committed such a dastardly act. It should have been him. 

“Forgive me,” he choked against his arms, and turned his head away from the torn scraps of yellow cloth, the hollyhock beyond recognition. “I should have been here.” 

The silence that followed in response was deafening.

_It should have been me IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME!_

What if they hate me now in the realms beyond what if they curse my name and he doubted they would, they were too, too kind for that, they had given him everything and in return he had let his guard down for the last and final time. He had trusted his friend. He had trusted Ieyasu. It had been the greatest mistake of his life. 

For the seventeenth time he brought a hand to his gut and closed his eyes and imagined what it would be like to find absolution in his own blade. Plunge and drag and drag and there that was _it_ he would atone, but that would not be enough, not for him. It would not give his brothers back the wind in their hair, the salty spray stinging their skin and their eyes it would not give him the shouts and the laughs and the boisterous cries at all hours of the morning and night. That was not what his brothers would have done if it had been him turned to dust underneath the stones and the remains of what once had been.

They would avenge him. They would make sure he had not departed from this earth in vain and now, now he saw he saw that he _owed_ it to them to do the very same – even if it meant facing down a man that he had thought was a friend. Even if it meant killing him, killing him with his own two hands traitors did not deserve to live punishment for mutiny is death, nothing more and nothing less. It was not revenge. It was not for his own personal satisfaction. It was for _them,_ all for them.

Wiping the dust from his palms, Motochika stood heavily and stared inland, away from his beloved sea. Towards Osaka. He knew what he had to do.


End file.
